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Friday, June 10, 2016

End the Normalized Predation of Women

I want to take the time to remind everyone that a huge aspect of rape culture is the fact that our society teaches men that having sex is a matter of power and conquest. How much of sex for boys and men is about doing whatever possible to get it? How much of night life for men is about targeting women, wearing down their defenses via alcohol, drugs, lies, calculated manipulation, or whatever they have at the disposal, to get a woman into bed?

It's a predator-prey relationship to men.

You can still see it in media all the time. How I Met Your Mother, though mercifully ended, is a very recent and perfect example. Many movies popular with my generation are perfect examples. And you see that same behavior played out in college fraternities, bars, and night clubs everywhere. This behavior is so normalized as to be expected and encouraged via shit like "ladies night." By the vast majority of our society, this behavior remains unquestioned. But it's rapist behavior.

Rapists prowl bars and parties looking for the woman they think will be most vulnerable to their tricks. Rapists use alcohol and drugs to make it easier to rape their victims. Rapists think everything they do is okay because this behavior is normalized by media and everyone else. Rapists say that their victims deserved it because they dared to be in their path and do what they wanted - engaging, drinking, taking drugs, being vulnerable. Rapists say that it wasn't rape because clearly their victims wanted it for doing any of those things.

This includes convicted rapists like Brock Turner and all the many, many men who get away with rape.

Recently I shared a post on Facebook that was going around containing a story in which a woman intervened and stopped a man from raping another woman. The story described a frat dude holding a very drunk, barely conscious woman up with his knees and body to try and make out with her, then started to basically drag her upstairs to rape her. The woman telling the story stopped him and took his victim away from him, triggering an angry meltdown in the rapist frat fuck.

He was described as having shouted insults and gendered slurs at her, enraged that his prey had been taken away. This was at a party, practically in public, after his victim told her rescuer in front of him that "no," she did not want to go upstairs with him. His actions so clearly were sexual assault and would have been rape, and he responded with rage at the denial of an opportunity to rape.

Did he not realize he was about to become a rapist? Did he not care?

And this happens all the time. Probably multiple times every Friday in this fucking country. There are thousands upon thousands of stories like this. Because men don't think they're doing anything wrong.

Men need to stop treating women like prey. Our society and media needs to stop teaching men to view women as prey. It needs to stop telling men that they're predators. All of this needs to stop immediately. No more shows like HIMYM. No more normalized, excused, and endorsed rapist behavior. Never again.